She pushed aside the bundle of political pamphlets which she had been studying, and sat looking out at the strip of garden beyond the arches of the cloister.  The narrow horizon bounded by convent walls symbolised fitly enough the life she had chosen to lead:  a life of artificial restraints and renunciations, passive, conventual almost, in which even the central point of her love burned, now, with a calm devotional glow.

The door in the cloister opened and the Duke crossed the garden.  He walked slowly, with the listless step she had observed in him of late; and as he entered she saw that he looked pale and weary.

“You have been at work again,” she said.  “A cabinet-meeting?”

“Yes,” he answered, sinking into the Abbess’s high carved chair.

He glanced musingly about the dim room, in which the shadow of the cloister made an early dusk.  Its atmosphere of monastic calm, of which the significance did not escape him, fell soothingly on his spirit.  It simplified his relation to Fulvia by tacitly restricting it within the bounds of a tranquil tenderness.  Any other setting would have seemed less in harmony with their fate.

Better, perhaps, than Fulvia, he knew what ailed them both.  Happiness had come to them, but it had come too late; it had come tinged with disloyalty to their early ideals; it had come when delay and disillusionment had imperceptibly weakened the springs of passion.  For it is the saddest thing about sorrow that it deadens the capacity for happiness; and to Fulvia and Odo the joy they had renounced had returned with an exile’s alien face.

Seeing that he remained silent, she rose and lit the shaded lamp on the table.  He watched her as she moved across the room.  Her step had lost none of its flowing grace, of that harmonious impetus which years ago had drawn his boyish fancy in its wake.  As she bent above the lamp, the circle of light threw her face into relief against the deepening shadows of the room.  She had changed, indeed, but as those change in whom the springs of life are clear and abundant:  it was a development rather than a diminution.  The old purity of outline remained; and deep below the surface, but still visible sometimes to his lessening insight, the old girlish spirit, radiant, tender and impetuous, stirred for a moment in her eyes.

The lamplight fell on the pamphlets she had pushed aside.  Odo picked one up.  “What are these?” he asked.

“They were sent to me by the English traveller whom Andreoni brought here.”

He turned a few pages.  “The old story,” he said.  “Do you never weary of it?”

“An old story?” she exclaimed.  “I thought it had been the newest in the world.  Is it not being written, chapter by chapter, before our very eyes?”

Odo laid the treatise aside.  “Are you never afraid to turn the next page?” he asked.

“Afraid?  Afraid of what?”

“That it may be written in blood.”